If the CO2 is somehow released, it will not be possible to drive away from the accident because car engines require oxygen to burn fuel.
Well, that, and because humans require oxygen to remain conscious. If there's so little oxygen in the air that your car won't start, your car won't be the worst of your problems.
OTOH your self-driving EV could perhaps evacuate your unconscious body from the area
The stable genius jr. has concluded that fusion technology is pointless anyway. Coal and oil are the future!
That's your tell that fusion has a promising future. Some people aren't like a stopped clock (broken but occasionally correct by sheer coincidence), so much as like a compass whose needle has been magnetized backwards and always points south (always precisely the opposite of correct, and therefore informative if you know to negate their indication).
Q: What's in the box?
A: We don't really know, lol, but it seems to work okay!
Q: Will it keep my data secure?
A: There's no way to know, let's just hope for the best!
The instruction to "eliminate political bias" is in fact an instruction to require political bias. No government AI will be allowed to think thoughts that Trump doesn't approve of!
his isn't a dead end. There has already been massive success with AI just over the past 2 years.
Agreed that AI (in general) is not a dead end, but any particular implementation of AI might be. OpenAI et al are betting billions that their approach will turn out to be the best one, but it really is a bet; there's not guarantee that tomorrow the next DeepSeek won't come out with a better algorithm that obsoletes all their investments.
Apple has not participated in a meaningful way, and they will not catch up in this race.
Apple can always buy out whichever company they decide has what they want. It'll be pricey, but Apple has plenty of cash on hand.
That's why the huge expenditures, it will be 'winner take most'. Apple will have to pay someone for access to the best AI and at that point it won't come cheap.
Why will it be "winner takes most"? AI isn't like the Internet where there are network-effects that make first-mover status a huge advantage -- e.g. if I could write a better Facebook than Facebook today, it still wouldn't get used by anyone, since Facebook's advantage comes from its huge user base and my new platform wouldn't have one.
With AI, OTOH, anything the first-movers do, Apple can (eventually) copy and improve upon, a strategy they have used successfully many times in the past. Stepping back and letting others figure out what the works and doesn't work, on their own dime, seems like a good approach. Why burn money on what might be a dead-end, when others are happy to burn their own money for you?
Do nothing = win? Curious strategy.
Apple isn't doing nothing -- it's continuing to do the things that it has always done, like selling iPhones and computers and streaming services. Those things have always been profit centers for Apple, and they continue to be.
The other thing that it's doing correctly at this point is not losing its head and betting the farm on AI. Other companies would be wise to follow Apple's example.
... except instead of shoes becoming the only profitable product to manufacture, it's chatbots. Nobody knows why, but when it's all over, the only survivors will be those who evolved into computer-illiterate deaf-mutes.
The Metro wouldn't be safe by modern standards. Of course an old Honda Civic hatchback wouldn't be, either.
Agreed; but it is possible to make a Metro-sized car that is safe by modern standards and still gets 40+mpg. The Smart ForTwo and the Scion IQ are two examples.
The 3 cylinder Geo Metro in the 1990s achieved over 40 miles per gallon. 30 years later you're telling me we lost that ability?
Yes, but only because most Americans are unwilling to drive a Metro-sized car anymore. They've been conditioned to think small/lightweight cars are unsafe or unmanly or etc.
The fact that the government is mandating fuel efficiency means that most people don't care. If they cared, nobody would buy the inefficient cars so the manufacturers wouldn't make them, no need for government intervention.
The invisible hand of the free market solves a lot of things, but it's never quite figured out how to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants to live on a livable planet, but nobody wants to pay for the technology required to keep that way.
I traveled to poor countries where traffic is 90% scooters. This is all they can afford. I hope we can do better.
Being inexpensive to purchase and operate is one advantage scooters have over automobiles; the other is that they are small enough to maneuver quickly through heavy traffic and easier to find a parking spot for in congested areas.
I don't think slashdot has had any actual developers working on its since the early 2000s. It's a mature legacy codebase, destined to run as-is until it can't anymore, then go away.
Because we don't want them to instantly kill the first kid who jumps the fence, or the next careless service technician. Automated industrial robots (which is what these cars are, really) have these things for a reason.
I really hope that Waymo's cars aren't relying on their Nader-beepers to avoid killing people. They should be (and AFAIK are) relying instead on their video cameras, LIDARs, and other sensors to stop the car before it hits the wayward kid/technician.
Remember that these are the people who invented the use of CTRL-ALT-DEL hardware interrupts to "secure" the Windows login screen. That tells you all you need to know really.
Yes, they should have done it the right way instead!
Err, what was the right way? It's not obvious to me, given that Microsoft doesn't have design control over the hardware its software runs on.
He's like a function -- he returns a value, in the form of his opinion. It's up to you to cast it into a void or not. -- Phil Lapsley
